Marco Sampietro with a NASA Lecture

An Italian at NASA. More precisely, on 10 February a Bocconi professor will speak in Long Beach, California, during the annual Project Management Challenge organized by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which this year is entitled "Explore and Inspire." Marco Sampietro, faculty member of IT Economics at Università Bocconi and Lecturer at SDA, will be one of the speakers at an event which attracts the foremost scholars in this subject under the aegis of an important name, evoking images of spaceships, astronauts and daring missions into space. "Project management is a subject that was founded at NASA and to be invited to speak at such an important event of theirs is very gratifying," explains Marco Sampietro. "This is especially true because I will be able to explain a new idea that gave life to a book, Participating in a Project, which I wrote with Antonio Bassi and Tiziano Villa."

The topic that Sampietro will present on 10 February, within the section "Great Ideas," is Project Followership. "It is an untraditional viewpoint, with a look from the bottom-up, founded on the belief that today's winning factor is represented by the entire team's ability to behave and act as an engine to the project. The project manager is no longer seen as the only person responsible for the work." The organizers of the event seemingly appreciated this idea, continues Sampietro, "as external speakers are rare since all topics examined are strictly related to NASA." The Bocconi professor is confident that, in addition to being prestigious on a professional level, the event "is also an opportunity to give international significance to a new aspect of the discipline, confirming that Bocconi is an avant-garde university even on the topic of project management."